Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [113]
After a time they passed from sun into shadow, warmth into chill, and did not come out again. The edge of sun climbed the left-hand canyon wall. From time to time they had met or passed ore wagons of every size and kind from farm wagons drawn by a pair of mules to great arks, sometimes double, pulled by six, eight, ten, a dozen animals, driven not by lines but by a rider who rode one of the leaders. Now they came upon one of these arks up to its hubs in a mudhole, and two men down in the road working on the six-horse team. There was barely passing room between the wagon and a fifty-foot dropoff to the creek.
Prompt, almost fierce, Oliver stood up in the democrat. “Hang on.” She took hold of the dash and braced her feet. As they squeezed by, rattling stones over the edge, she had a long, passing look at a man’s bearded face, panting and distorted, and at the same time innocent, curious, fascinated, floating the long instant between the time when he stood up from his efforts and the time when he would renew them. His face hung like a jack-o’-lantern in the twilight of the mountains while an unlikely Eastern lady drove by. She read his face in complex ways–it was an expression she would have liked to draw. And she saw the horse, one of the leaders, that lay with its forelegs bent under it and its nose resting as if thoughtfully on the doubletree. Then they were past.
“Shouldn’t we have stopped to help?” she asked.
“You can’t be sure of the company.”
“Would it have been dangerous?”
“I wouldn’t take the chance.”
“That poor horse!”
“You’ll have to get used to that. In this altitude they get lung fever. Three hours after you notice they’re sick, they’re dead. I expect that one had it–he didn’t look able to get up, much less pull.”
The chilly dusk, the sight of that hopelessly mired, heavily laden wagon with its sick horse, the taciturnity with which Oliver devoted himself to his driving, made her feel small, awed, and dependent. Pulling the blanket around her, she moved as close to him as she could without interfering with his handling of the reins. He took them in his left hand and put his right around her, and they rode like lovers.
“Getting tired?”
“It seems a long time since I got up.”
“I’ll bet. How about another of those delicious sandwiches?”
Crawling at a walk up the darkening gulch, they ate. Right and left she saw the light orange on the peaks, the canyons almost wiped out in shadow. There was a sense–not a perception so much as an illusion or hallucination–of dark fir forests. Then there was a paleness of white trunks and bare delicate branches as they passed through aspens along a slope. Ahead, one pure star was shining through a V of dark mountains. She sagged, she almost dozed.
Then she roused up again. “Hang on again,” Oliver said. “Here’s the stage.”
In an unearthly pink light the stage labored on the grade ahead of them. It looked like something out of Mother Goose. There were men hanging all over the top of it, at least seven or eight of them. “Always room for one more,” Oliver said. “Here we go now.”
He whipped up the horses, the buggy pulled abreast in a brief wide place. No more than ten feet away, faces looked down into Susan’s, and she realized that the smell that enveloped the whole stage, moving with it as its own special atmosphere, was whiskey. The men above her stared, they visibly doubted their eyesight in the pink dusk, they said things, one or two, that she did not choose to hear as the horses pulled her past them.
Then she was even with the driver braced against the dash and seesawing his web of lines. He stared, he threw back his head in glad greeting and opened his mouth. For a moment she wondered if he thought he knew her, if by some miracle he could be someone from home, or Almaden. But Oliver pulled back on the lines and they bumped along side by side, and the stage